Constantly forgetting a pound of a morning for non-uniform day? Living in a home filled with clutter? Rushing around like a lunatic to get to clubs / parents’ evenings / kids’ birthday parties? If all of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Keeping your family organised can be difficult.
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| Bring order to the chaos with these organisation tips for busy families |
However, with some simple family organisation tips, you can get your home and your family a little more streamlined and a lot more organised. Here are some simple tips that can really make a big impact with home organisation.
6 Ways To Keep Your Family Organised
1. Make mornings work for you
A good morning routine can make all the difference to your entire day. And so if morning’s are your organisational sticking point, remember that there are some simple things that you can do to make your mornings go more smoothly.
This is a whole topic of organisation in itself, which you can read about in more detail here, but the crux of getting your morning routine down pat is really as simple as the following:
- Get as much as possible ready the night before.
- Sign and return any school forms as soon as you receive them.
- Keep a pot of change by the door, so that you can grab a pound coin whenever it’s needed for non-uniform days and the like.
- Stick to a routine that’s easy for everyone to follow.
If you can master these basics, then the rest of the morning routine should follow.
2. Create a family hub
By this I mean creating a central place where you can store all of those things that are needed regularly: gloves, hats, school bags, school shoes, work bags etc etc. This could also mean having a notice board or whiteboard in the same place to store any important notes, or hold any letters to be sent, ready to have everything to hand for any outing, not just school runs.
By creating such a ‘command centre’ within your home, it will make all departures from the house less stressful, with no hunting around for those essentials that it takes to get a child out of the house.
3. Create a cleaning routine
There is no right or wrong way of going about this, as it’s really about what works for you as a family. Most people find that little and often works well for them, but if a weekend purge works better for your family, then go for that instead.
I do, however, recommend divvying up the chores, and the earlier that you can teach your children to clean, the better. This lightens the load for all concerned, and also teaches your children that in your family, you work as a team.
4. Keep a regular donations box available
If you’re being swallowed up by clutter in your home, then why not try keeping a donations box to hand ready to take things to the charity shop once full? This can also help to encourage your children to donate old toys once they’ve grown out of them and give them to the more needy.
You can also do something similar for the items that you want to sell, but be aware that this box is likely to hang around for longer, until you’ve shifted the items on Vinted, Ebay or at a car boot sale!
5. Keep a to do list
A simple but an easy thing to keep everyone organised is a to do list. This could be in a notebook, or on a whiteboard; alternatively, it could be a digital to do list that the whole family can access; the latter certainly helps with dividing up chores. What’s more, if someone is able to pick up a chore that they wouldn’t normally take on, purely because they’ve seen it on the digital to do list, then that really helps other people within your family unit.
6. Meal plan
Meal planning can be really useful for those nights when you’ve got a lot going on, and even for those nights when you’re a little freer.
Having quick, easy to make recipes and the corresponding ingredients readily available makes life a lot easier: it cuts out those extra runs to the shop for forgotten ingredients and it means that you can quickly create meals on those nights when you are running a taxi service to and from clubs.
I hope these tips have helped to serve as inspiration for organising your family. Of course, there are plenty of other things that you can do to make family life run smoothly, but these are a good start. Why not adopt one or two new habits today and see what a difference they make to family life?
